Main hater arguments: "We were conned, the Mods are rude, and Devs are unprofessional!"
Main simp arguments: "It's not even EA yet so they don't owe you jack, rudeness is returned with rudeness, and get off their backs they're doing their best!"

• First off, we were not conned, but we were taken advantage of by people who can't deliver on their promises, and then have sequentially lied about it even after being caught lying. It's close, but not the same, due to a lack of original intent to deceive (I hope). I'll close out with this more because it's the main point of contention, but....
  
  
• Second, the mods really are rude, and yes rudeness is returned with rudeness, but this all began due to the initial radio-silence and then the ABSURD reaction that the moderators had to the community. I was there, I saw who fired the first shots, and it was the mods primarily and a couple fanboys (one robotic zombie of beep-boop nature, specifically) piling on to 1 or 2 people saying that they were worried that this roll-out and lack of Dev response was going to be a sign of things to come. This started to get the community to be up in arms a bit, and by the time the Devs woke up (that was the excuse given for the lack of communication...remember they said "oh the Devs are all sleeping right now while the roll-out is happening") they basically jumped on and said "shut up its all your fault quit hitting F5, oh wait no we mean it's a DDOS, hey okay so maybe it's not really a DDOS but look we don't owe you jack for an explanation just stay in the dark for half a day," and then we find out no, it's because they were out of steam keys which bottle necked people and kept the queue from shrinking. Well, since then, the majority of the people who spent their money have been set on a sour path and the people who sided with the Devs feel like they have to stand by their statements, hence this community divide.
  
  
• Third, the development process really has been mired with unprofessional decisions, but they have also been hounded every step of the way. Now, each side is right on this one. First, these devs apparently had NO idea what they were getting into. They did not spend enough time in the planning and pre-development phase before going into their crowdfunding phase, and it has never stopped haunting them. However, as we have all discovered, the team (which has gone through many changes) is just not going to be able to hold up to their original promises and can't deliver on that product in anywhere NEAR the timeline they originally put forth (obviously haha or else, you know, it'd be in EA and planning for a not-too-distant release by now). This is frustrating for both parties, because both sides know that the other side is right. Riding the devs isn't going to make them go any faster, because they are not skilled or experienced enough to progress any quicker than they already are. That sentence alone and the truth of it answers the complaints of both sides. Yes, they should be just left in the oven to finish cooking because every time you open that door to yell at the turkey to cook faster you cool it down, but at the same time if you leave a game that's already received its funding in too long it just gets burned and thrown out, so there are legitimate gripes on both sides.

Now, I'm not a fence-sitter. I am definitely more on the "pissed at the devs" side than I am of the "forgiving and understanding" side, but I see both points. Still, it ain't gonna help to throw figurative rocks at them while they're trying to figure out how to un-eff themselves from this situation and deliver a product that they oversold their abilities to craft. Either way, I'm here to talk about this crazy community divide, and my issue with those sides.

My biggest gripe of either side is without a doubt when the simps say ignorant lines like, "it's on you because you risked your money, and apparently you didn't know what the eff you were getting into when backing this project!!"
Well see, no, that's the actual root of the problem, here! We were given an idea of "what the eff we were getting into when backing this project!" We were given dev logs, trailers, a list of planned features, "completed" assets, working electrical systems, working crafting and building and zombie AI systems, a well detailed road map (which is always taken with a grain of salt from new devs but speaks to their own expectations), and all promised within the scope of their original crowd-funding goal. So yeah, we were absolutely given an idea of what to expect when getting behind this project.

These damn devs got almost FIVE TIMES the funding of their stated required financial resources by the end of the initial campaign ($1,572,168 usd or $1,966,467 cad which is 476% of what they asked for with $258,000 being their furthest-imagined stretch goal, not to mention several Canadian grants, and a quarter of a million from Kickstarter), and for a while they kept collecting money on the Qisoft site even after that. That is a HUUUGE financial boon to work off of! They could had easily employed several professionals with that giant pile of extra money to help meet their goals in a timely fashion (or at all). And their goals were lofty, but also attainable, with the January 2019 Closed-Alpha due date originally being pushed to "Summer 2019," then declared as March 2020, then June, then finally August 2020. People had been EXTREMELY patient and understanding with the release being pushed back over a year-and-a-half, so when this mess dropped (and it was a mess) and then the community received abuse from the fanboys, mods, and devs in turn, it just got really, really ugly really, really fast.

[[[EDIT: The total amounts were disclosed and between sales, kickestarter and other backer positions plus grants and investments, it was actually over $4 Million]]]

Now, with the actual key roll-out being as atrociously and amateurishly handled as it was, and after almost 3 years of promises, dev blogs, videos, little teaser snippet update posts, and tons of pics and gifs, that hype train that had been a-rollin' was about to reach its first stop....aaaand it derailed IMMEDIATELY.

Look, sure, CA is CA, but what we were told to expect out of the CA and what we ended up getting just made that iron-clad "sign your life away" NDA make total sense, and felt like another slap in the face. It wasn't that we had to do an NDA, that wasn't a big deal. It was that it seemed more effort was put into the NDA security measures than the actual game! These guys had NOTHING. This was way worse than even the footage shown to us in like 2018. How was the UI so unusable? Why did the graphics look soooo terrible compared to all the footage we were given? What was with these wonky physics? Why are the zombies so different than what we had been shown time after time after time? Where were all the little things that we'd been shown as having been implemented (and that they said were implemented, mind you)? It was just SUCH a let-down!

So, is this an intentional scam? No. Is this a malicious con-job? No.

This is what is called a textbook bait-and-switch, where you are promised one thing, but you are given a much more inferior product than you were lured into paying for. It's not "the risk of backing," or "false advertisement," or "basically a demo," no...this is worse than any of that, and it's more than just bad business. This is the devs realizing they aren't skilled enough to produce this product, and not properly reinvesting the money they took to hire talent that can meet their goals, and so yes, absolutely the backers have a right to be upset that promise after promise is subsequently broken and the response from a couple of the Devs for months was "if ya don't like it, git ouuuut!!" Especially when from jump street several of the developers and a notable portion of the community moderators have been toxic to the community and outright abusive to anyone asking for a refund once they saw the game was going in a different direction than was promised.

Now, if you are a hater and you're upset, there are only two rational things you can do in this situation:
1) Request a refund and if it's denied then seek legal recourse (bait and switch dealer fraud in the USA makes you entitled to up to triple the product's cost in damages for your losses, attorney’s fees and costs, and court fees and costs)
2) Take your inferior product and just chalk it up to another disappointment and a further lesson why to never trust indie devs with your money before the product is out (especially Canadian and Russian devs, which seem to be doing this with surprisingly more frequency over the past 3 years -- as of 2021 anyway).

Or, if you are a simp for the devs and you're upset about the people who are griping about this, there are also only two rational things you can do:
1) Ignore them and maintain on with your faith that the newest line-up of Qisoft devs will make this dream a reality
2) Report toxic posts that break community guidelines while trusting that posts airing legitimate game-development issues will be properly assessed and considered for moderators and developers on their own

• Haters put down your pitchforks they don't care what you have to say, anyway
  
• Simps quit white-knighting for devs that are barely even working on the game, it's not a good look seriously, and your posts don't age well

There is ALWAYS risk in backing a game, but this is a shiny example of it being the Devs' and Mods' fault that the community at large has turned against them and the salt has flowed. The only way to repair that rift is to stop pushing half-assed updates and to start making actual positive momentum toward a completed project. For a game that was greenlit in 2016 and looked like this video below in 2018 you gotta admit, there's absolutely reason to be skeptical and disappointed in the current state.
https://youtu.be/CchmkUNfNm4

SPEAKING of posts that don't age well... Now, friend or foe you can say what you want, but this statement from 2017 did not age well! Just a little chiding bite at the moderators who absolutely let a little power given to them by having administrative positions in a Pre-Alpha indie dev game's social media platforms go to their heads to effing Maoist levels!